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The U.S. Interior Department last week rejected a nuclear waste stockpile at an American Indian reservation in Utah’s west desert.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said the decision kills a plan to store 44,000 tons of spent fuel rods on the Goshute Indians’ Skull Valley reservation, about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.
It’s not dead, said John Parkyn, chairman and CEO of Private Fuel Storage.
“We’ll respond to questions posed by the Department of Interior that they felt have not been answered,” Parkyn said Monday.
The Interior Department used its power to veto a lease Goshute leaders approved for the stockpile. The agency also refused to yield federal land for a transfer station where fuel rods would be transferred from rail cars to tractor-trailers.
It was the final obstacle for Private Fuel Storage, known as PFS, a group of nuclear-power utilities that won a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in February. Xcel Energy and La Crosse-based Dairyland Power Cooperative are among the consortium’s members.
“PFS is dead,” Hatch said. “To me, it’s a great day for Utah."
The Interior Department’s refusal came in two decisions totaling 47 pages released to The Associated Press by Hatch’s office.
U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, “rejoiced” at news of the rejection, saying, “now we can celebrate the demise of this dangerous disposal scheme.“
Private Fuel Storage billed the Goshute stockpile as temporary until the federal government can open a national repository at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.
Yet Matheson said Utah could have become a “de facto” home for nuclear waste given troubles at the Yucca project, which he said won’t open until 2017, if then.
“Utahns stand united against the East Coast dumping its nuclear garbage on the West. Today’s decisions prove that perseverance pays and I couldn’t be more relieved,” Matheson said.
Dairyland Power wants to send to the planned Utah facility the 40 tons of spent fuel now stored at its closed nuclear reactor in Genoa, Wis.
The reactor, which Dairyland shut down in 1987, was built by the federal government in 1967.
Until the spent fuel is removed, Dairyland cannot fully decommission the Genoa nuclear facility.
It estimates that maintaining the closed facility until the spent fuel can be moved costs Dairyland more than $5.5 million annually.
